By Maxim Gorky Originally printed in the U. S. A. about 1930

When he said good-by to me in London he promised to come to Capri for a rest. But before he had made up his mind to come, I saw him in Paris in a two-roomed student’s flat (it was a student’s flat only in size, not in the cleanliness and order that reigned there). Nadejda Konstantinovna² had gone out after giving us tea and we remained alone together.

Znaniye had just gone to pieces, and I had come to discuss with V. Ilyitch the organization of a new publishing house which would embrace as far as possible all our literary people. I proposed for the editorial office abroad, V. Vorovsky and some one else, and in Russia V. A. Dyesnitsky would represent them. I thought that a series of books should be published on the history of the literatures of the West and on Russian literature, books on the history of civilization which would provide the workers with a mine of information for purposes of self-education and propaganda. But Vladimir Ilyitch quashed the plan by pointing to the censorship and the difficulty of organizing the people. The majority of the comrades were occupied with practical Party work – they had no time for writing. But his chief, and for me, most conclusive argument was approximately as follows: There is no time for writing thick books. A thick book would be read only by the intelligentsia, who are quite evidently giving up Socialism for liberalism and it is not for us to turn them from the path they have chosen. Newspapers and pamphlets are what we need. It would be a good thing to renew the Znaniye library, but it would be impossible in Russia because of the censorship, and here because of transport. We have to throw scores of hundreds of thousands of pamphlets into the masses, it would be impossible to convey such a heap illegally. Let us wait for a publishing house till better times.

With his invariably striking vividness and clarity, he began to talk about the Duma and the Cadets¹ who, he said, are “ashamed to be Octobrists”² and have only one way open to them, the road to the right. Then he brought forward a series of arguments for the imminence of war and “probably not of one, but of a whole series of wars”; a prophecy which was speedily fulfilled in the Balkans. He got up and with characteristic gesture, putting his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes, paced slowly up and down the little room, screwing up his bright eyes, said:

“War is coming. It is inevitable. The capitalist world has reached the stage of putrescent fermentation. People are already beginning to poison themselves with the drugs of chauvinism and nationalism. I think we shall yet see a general European war.

“The proletariat? The proletariat will hardly be able to find in itself the strength to avert the carnage. How could it be done? A general strike of workers all over Europe? They are not yet sufficiently organized or class-conscious for that. Such a strike would be the signal for a civil war but we as practical politicians cannot count on that.”

He paused, scraping the soles of his shoes on the floor, then said gloomily: “The proletariat of course will suffer terribly. Such must be its fate for some time yet. But its enemies will weaken each other, that also is inevitable.”

Coming up to me he said forcibly but not loudly, as if in amazement: “No, but think of it. Why should people who are well-fed force hungry ones to fight against each other? Could you name a more idiotic or more revolting crime? The workers will pay a dreadfully heavy price for this, but in the end they will gain. It is the will of history.”

He often spoke of history but I never felt in what he said any fetishistic worship of its will or power.

His words had agitated him. He sat down and, wiping the sweat from his forehead, drank a little cold tea and asked unexpectedly: “What was that affair of yours in America? I know from the newspapers what it was about, but how did it end?”

I briefly related my adventures. I have never met a man who could laugh so infectiously as Lenin. It was strange to see such a stern realist, a man who saw so well, and felt so deeply, the inevitability of great social catastrophes, irreconcilable, relentless in his hatred towards the capitalist world, laughing like a child, till the tears came, till he choked with laughter. To laugh like that one must have the soundest and healthiest of minds.

“Oh, you are a – humorist!” he said through his laughter. “I would never have thought that anything could be so funny.”

Wiping his eyes, he was at once serious, and said with his kind, soft smile: “It’s a good thing that you can meet failure with humor. Humor is a splendid, healthy quality. And really life is as funny as it is sad, just as much.”

We agreed that I should visit him in a day’s time, but the weather was bad and I began spitting a good deal of blood in the evening and left the next day.

The next time we met after Paris was in Capri. I had a very strange impression at that time – as though V. Ilyitch were twice in Capri and in two sharply different moods. One Ilyitch, when I met him at the wharf, immediately declared to me resolutely: “I know A. M. that you are always hoping that it will be possible to reconcile me with the Machists although I warned you of the futility of it in a letter. So don’t make any attempts.”

I tried to explain to him on the way to my lodgings and afterwards, that he was not absolutely right. I never have had, nor have I now, any intention of reconciling opposing philosophies which, by the way, I do not understand very well. In addition I had been mistrustful of all philosophies from my youth, and the cause of this mistrust had always been the contradiction between philosophy and my personal “subjective” experience. For me the world had only just begun, it was in the process of becoming, but philosophy gave it a slap on the head and put to it the entirely misplaced and irrelevant question: “Whither are you going? Wherefore are you going? Why do you think?” Some philosophers give the simple, stern command, “Stop!” In addition, I was aware that philosophy, like a woman, can be very plain, even hideous, but dressed up so skillfully and convincingly that she can be taken for a beauty.

This made V. Ilyitch laugh. “Well, that’s making a joke of it,” he said. “That the world is only beginning, is in process of becoming – well, think it over seriously. You will come from that point to the place where you ought to have come long ago.”

Then I told him that in my eyes A. A. Bogdanov, A. Lunacharsky and V. A. Bazarov were important people, highly and thoroughly educated, and had no equals in the Party.

“Granted. Well, what follows?”

“I consider them to be people aiming finally at the same thing, and if profoundly understood and realized, the unity of their aim should wipe out and annihilate philosophical contradictions.”

“That means that the hope of reconciliation is still alive after all? It is quite useless,” he said. “Put it out of your head, as completely as possible, I advise you as a friend. Plekhanov, according to you, has the same aim as well, and I, between ourselves, consider that he has quite another aim, although he is a materialist and not a metaphysician.”

Our conversation ended here. There is no need, I think, to say that I have not reproduced it in exactly the original words. But I am quite sure of the accuracy of the ideas.

So Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin stood before me even more firm and more inflexible than at the London Congress. But then he was agitated, then there were times when the Party split clearly made him live through some painful moments. Now he was in a calm, rather cold and satirical mood, sternly putting aside all philosophical themes, and continually on the alert.

A. A. Bogdanov, who was an extremely attractive person, of a very mild character and very fond of Lenin, though with a rather high opinion of himself, had to listen to these biting and painful words: “Schopenhauer said that ‘clear thinking means clear speaking’ and I think he never said a truer word. You don’t explain yourself clearly, Comrade Bogdanov. Explain to me in a few words what your ‘substitution’ will give to the working class, and why Machism is more revolutionary than Marxism?”

Bogdanov tried to explain but he really did speak in a confused and wordy fashion.

“Drop it,” advised V. Ilyitch. “Somebody or other, Jaures, I think, said, ‘It is better to speak the truth than to be a minister’ – or a Machist, I would add.” Then he plunged into a game of chess with Bogdanov, and when he lost grew angry and even despondent like a child. It is worthy of remark that even this childish despondency, like his astonishing laugh, did not impair the completeness and unity of his character.

There was in Capri another Lenin – a splendid comrade, a light-hearted person with a lively, inexhaustible interest in everything in the world, and strikingly gentle. Late one evening when every one had gone out for a walk, he said to me and M. F. Andreyeva sadly and with deep regret: “Such clever and talented people, who have done a great deal for the Party, and could do ten times more – and they will not go with us! They cannot do so. And scores, hundreds of such people are ruined and mutilated by this criminal regime.”

Another time he said: “Lunacharsky will return to the Party. He is less of an individualist than the other two. He has a highly gifted nature such as is rarely met with. I ‘have a weakness’ for him. What stupid words, ‘to have a weakness!’ I am really very fond of him, you know, he is a splendid comrade! There is something of the French brilliancy about him. His levity is the result of his estheticism.”

He asked in detail about the life of the Capri fishermen, about their earnings, the influence of the priests, their schools. I could not but be surprised at the range of his interests. When a priest was pointed out to him, the son of a poor peasant, he immediately asked for information as to how often the peasants send their children to the seminaries, and whether the children returned to their own village as priests.

“You understand? If this isn’t an isolated case, it means that it is the policy of the Vatican – an artful policy!”

I cannot imagine another man who, so far surpassing other people, could yet remain unaffected by ambitious cravings and retain a lively interest in simple folk.

There was a certain magnetic quality in him which drew the hearts and sympathies of the working people to him. He did not speak Italian, but the Capri fishermen, who had seen Chaliapin and many other outstanding Russians, by a kind of instinct put Lenin in a special place at once. His laugh was enchanting – the hearty laugh of a man, who through being so well acquainted with the clumsy stupidity of human beings and the acrobatic trickery of the quick-witted, could find pleasure in the child-like artlessness of the “simple in heart.” One old fisherman, Giovanni Spadaro, said of him: “Only an honest man could laugh like that.” We would go rowing sometimes, on water blue and transparent as the sky, and Lenin learned how to catch fish “with his finger” – using the line alone, without the rod. The fishermen explained to him that the fish must be hooked when the finger feels the vibration of the line. “Cosi: drin, drin. Capisce?”

A second later he hooked a fish, drew it in and cried out with child-like joy and a hunter’s excitement, “Drin, drin.” The fishermen roared with laughter, gay as children, and nicknamed the fisherman “Signor Drin-Drin.” After he had gone away, they continued to ask: “How is Drin-Drin getting on? The Tsar hasn’t caught him yet?”

I do not remember if it was before Lenin’s visit or after that Plekhanov came to Capri. Some of the emigrants in the Capri colony, the writer Oliger, Lorentz-Mettner, who was condemned to death for organizing the rising in Sotchi, Paul Vigdorchik, and, I think, two others, wanted to speak to him. He refused. He had a right to do so. He was ill and had come for a rest. But Oliger and Lorentz told me that he had refused in a very offensive way. Oliger, who was of a highly- strung temperament, insisted that Plekhanov had said something about “being sick of the crowd of people who all want to speak but are incapable of doing anything.” When he was with me, he really did not wish to see any one from the local colony. Ilyitch saw them all. Plekhanov never asked about anything. He already knew it all and told you all about it himself. Talented in the wide Russian way and with a European education, he loved to parade his wit, and for the sake apparently of a pungent jest would lay the crudest emphasis on the weak points of foreign or Russian comrades. To me his witticisms often appeared pointless and only such have remained in my memory: “Immoderately moderate Mehring; Enrico Ferri is an imposter; there is neither gold nor iron in him.” This pun was built up on the word ferro, meaning iron. All of them were after this pattern. As a general rule he had a condescending manner towards people, as if he were a god. I felt deep respect for him as a very talented writer and the theoretical inspirer of the Party, but no sympathy. There was too much of the “aristocrat” in him. I may be mistaken in my judgment. I am not fond of indulging in mistakes, but like everybody else cannot always avoid them.

But the fact remains that I have rarely met two people with less in common than G. V. Plekhanov and V. I. Lenin; and this was natural. The one was finishing his work of destroying the old world, the other was beginning the construction of a new.

Life plays such malicious tricks on us, that those who are incapable of real hatred are incapable of real love also. This fact alone, distorting human nature at the root, this unavoidable division of the soul, the inevitability of love through hatred, condemns the modern conditions of life to dissolution.

I have never met in Russia, the country where the inevitability of suffering is preached as the general road to salvation, nor do I know of, any man who hated, loathed and despised so deeply and strongly as Lenin all unhappiness, grief and suffering. In my eyes, these feelings, this hatred of the dramas and tragedies of life exalted Lenin more than anything, belonging as he did to a country where the greatest masterpieces have been gospels in praise and sanctification of suffering, and where youth begins its life under the influence of books which are in essence descriptions of petty, trivial dramas monotonously unvarying. The literature of Russia is the most pessimistic in Europe. All our books are written on one and the same theme – how we suffer in youth and middle-age from our own foolishness, from the oppressive weight of autocracy, on account of women, from love of one’s neighbor, from the unsuccessful structure of the universe; how we suffer in old age from consciousness of the mistakes we have made in our lives, from lack of teeth, from indigestion and the imminence of death. Every Russian who has passed a month in prison for some political offense, and a year in exile, considers it his sacred duty to present Russia with a book of reminiscences about his sufferings. But a happy life no one has ever thought of putting into the form of memoirs. As Russians are in the habit of thinking out what their lives shall be, but unable to make them come out that way, maybe such a book would teach them how to devise a happy life.

Lenin was exceptionally great, in my opinion, precisely because of this feeling in him of irreconcilable, unquenchable hostility towards the sufferings of humanity, his burning faith that suffering is not an essential and unavoidable part of life, but an abomination which people ought and are able to sweep away.

Differences with Lenin in 1917

In the years 1917-18 my relations with Lenin were not what I would have wished them to be, but they could not be otherwise. He was a politician. He had to perfection that clear-sighted directness of vision which is so indispensable in the helmsman of so enormous and heavily burdened a ship as Russia with its dead-weight of peasants. I have an organic distaste for politics, and little faith in the reasoning powers of the masses, especially of the peasants. Reason without ordered ideas is yet far from being the force which lives in creative activity. There can be no ideas in the minds of the mass until the community of interests of all the separate individuals is realized.

The mass has been striving for thousands of years towards the good, and this striving engenders rapacious beasts out of the flesh of the mass, which enslave it and live on its blood. So it will be, until it realizes that there is only one force which can free it from the thraldom of the beasts, the force of the truth which Lenin taught.

When in 1917 Lenin on his arrival in Russia published his theses¹ I thought that by these theses he was sacrificing to the Russian peasantry the small but heroic band of politically educated workers and all the genuine revolutionaries of the intelligentsia. The single active force in Russia, I thought, would be thrown like a handful of salt into the vapid bog of village life, and would dissolve without leaving any trace, would be sucked down without effecting any change in the mind, life or history of the Russian people. The professional intelligentsia, in general, the scientists and technicians, were, from my point of view, revolutionaries by nature, and this socialist intelligentsia, together with the workers, were for me the most precious force stored up in Russia. In 1917 I did not see any other force capable of taking power, and organizing the village. But only on condition of complete inner unity could this force, numerically insignificant and split by contradictions, fulfill its role. Before them stood a tremendous task – to bring order into the anarchy of the village, to discipline the mind of the peasant, teach him to work rationally, to reorganize his economy, and by such means make the country progress. All this could only be achieved by subjecting the instincts of the village to the reason of the town.

The primary task of the revolution I considered to be the creation of the conditions which would lead to the development of the cultural forces of the country. To this end I offered to organize in Capri a school for workers, and in the years of reaction, from 1907 to 1913, tried as much as I could to raise the spirits of the workers by every possible method. With this end in view immediately after the February Revolution, there was organized the Free Association for the Development and Spread of Positive Science, an institution which aimed on the one hand, at organizing in Russia scientific research institutions, and on the other, at a broad and continuous popularization of scientific and technical knowledge among the workers. At the head o£ the Association were the eminent scientists and members o£ the Academy of Sciences, V. A. Steklov, L. A. Tchugayev, Academician Fersman, S. P. Kostytchev, A. A. Petrovsky, and a number of others. The means were being got together with great energy; S. P. Kostytchev had already begun to look for a place for the Institute of Zoological and Botanical Research.

In order to make myself quite clear I will add that all my life, the depressing effect of the prevalency of the illiteracy of the village on the town, the individualism of the peasants, and their almost complete lack of social emotions had weighed heavily on my spirits. The dictatorship of the politically enlightened workers, in close connection with the scientific and technical intelligentsia, was, in my opinion, the only possible solution to a difficult situation which the war had made especially complicated by rendering the village still more anarchical. I differed from the Bolsheviks on the question of the value of the role of the intelligentsia in the Russian Revolution, which had been prepared by this same intelligentsia to which belonged all the Bolsheviks who had educated hundreds of workers in the spirit of social heroism and genuine intellectuality. The Russian intelligentsia, the scientific and professional intelligentsia, I thought, had always been, was still, and would long be the only beast of burden to drag along the heavy load of Russian history. In spite of all shocks and impulses and stimulation which it had experienced, the mind of the masses of the people had remained a force still in need of leadership from without.

So I thought in 1917 – and was mistaken. This page of my reminiscences should be tom out. But “what has been written by the pen cannot be cut down by the ax”; and “we learn by our mistakes” as V. Ilyitch often repeated. Let the reader know my mistake. It will have done some good if it serves as a warning to those who are inclined to draw hasty conclusions. Of course, after a series of cases of the most despicable sabotaging by a number of specialists, I had no alternative but to change my attitude toward the scientific and technical professionals. Such changes cost something – especially in old age.

The duty of true-hearted leaders of the people is superhumanly difficult. A leader who is not in some degree a tyrant, is impossible. More people, probably, were killed under Lenin than under Thomas Münzer; but without this, resistance to the revolution of which Lenin was the leader would have been more widely and more powerfully organized. In addition to this we must take into account the fact that with the development of civilization the value of human life manifestly depreciates, a fact which is clearly proved by the growth in contemporary Europe of the technique of annihilating people, and the taste for doing so.

I challenge any one to say frankly how far he approves of, and how far he is revolted by, the hypocrisy of the moralists who talk about the bloodthirstiness of the Russian Revolution when they not only showed no pity for the people who were exterminated during the four years of the infamous Pan-European War, but by all possible means fanned the flame of this abominable war to “the victorious end.” To-day the “civilized” nations are ruined, exhausted, decaying, and vulgar petty bourgeois philistinism which is common to all races reigns triumphant, there is no escape from its halter and people are being strangled to death.

Much has been said and written about Lenin’s cruelty. I have no intention, of course, of doing anything so ridiculously tactless as to defend him against lies and calumny. I know that lying and slandering is a legitimate method in petty bourgeois politics, a usual way of attacking an enemy. It would be impossible to find a single great man in the world to-day who has not had some mud thrown at him. This is known to everybody. Besides this, there is a tendency in all people not only to reduce an outstanding man to the level of their own comprehension, but to roll him beneath their feet in the viscid noisome mud which they have created and call “every day life.”

The following incident is for me repulsively memorable. In 1919 there was a congress in Petrograd of “the village poor.” From the villages in the north of Russia came several thousands of peasants, some hundreds of whom were housed in the Winter Palace of the Romanovs. When the congress was over, and these people had gone away, it appeared that not only all the baths of the palace, but also a great number of priceless Sevres, Saxon and oriental vases had been befouled by them for lavatory use. It was not necessary to do this since the lavatories of the palace were in good order and the water system working. No, this vandalism was an expression of the desire to sully and debase things of beauty. Two revolutions and a war have supplied me with hundreds of cases of this lurking, vindictive tendency in people, to smash, deform, ridicule and defame the beautiful. It must not be thought that I emphasize the conduct of the village poor because of my skeptical attitude to the peasants. This is not the case.

This malicious desire to deface things of exceptional beauty is fundamentally the same as the odious tendency to vilify an exceptional man. Anything exceptional prevents people from living as they want to live. People long, if they have any longings, not for any fundamental change in their social habits, but to acquire additional habits. The gist of the wailing and complaining of the majority is, “Do not interfere with the way of living to which we are accustomed!” Vladimir Lenin was a man who knew better than any one else how to prevent people from leading the life to which they were accustomed. The hatred of the world bourgeoisie for him is nakedly and repellently manifest; the livid plague spot of it shows unmistakably. Disgusting in itself, this hatred yet tells us how great and terrible in the eyes of the world bourgeoisie is Vladimir Lenin, the inspirer and leader of the proletarians of the whole world.

His physical body no longer exists, but his voice sounds ever louder and more triumphantly in the ears of the workers of the earth, and already there is no corner of the world where this voice does not rouse the will of the people to revolution, to the new life, to the creation of a world of equal people. With ever-growing confidence, strength and success do those who were the pupils of Lenin and are now the inheritors of his power carry on the great work.

“The Perfectly Fashioned Figure of Truth”

It was the clearly expressed will to live in him, his active hatred of life’s abominations, which attracted me to him. I loved the youthful eagerness which he put into everything he did. His movements were light and agile, and his rare but powerful gestures were in full harmony with his speech, sparing as it was in words, in thought abounding. On his slightly Mongolian face glowed and sparkled the keen eyes of a tireless fighter against the lies and sorrows of life – now glowing and burning, now screwed up, now blinking, now ironically smiling, now lashing with anger. The gleam of his eyes made his words more glowing. Sometimes it seemed as if the indomitable energy of his soul flew out in sparks through his eyes, and his words, shot through and through with it, hung shining in the air. His words always gave one the impression of the physical pressure of an irresistible truth.

It was an unusual and extraordinary thing to see Lenin in the park at Gorky,¹ so much has the idea of him become associated with the picture of a man sitting at the end of a long table and expertly and skillfully guiding the comrades in their work, with the observant eyes of a pilot, smiling and beaming; or standing on a platform with head thrown back, casting clear distinct words to the hushed crowd, before the eager faces of the people thirsting for truth.

His words always brought to my mind the cold glitter of steel shavings. From these words, with amazing simplicity, there rose the perfectly fashioned figure of truth.

He was venturesome by nature but his was not the mercenary venturesomeness of the gambler. In Lenin it was the manifestation of that exceptional moral courage which can be found only in a man with an unshakable belief in his calling, in a man with a profound and complete perception of his connection with the world, and perfect comprehension of his role in the chaos of the world, the role of enemy of that chaos.

With equal enthusiasm he would play chess, look through “A History of Dress,” dispute for hours with comrades, fish, go for walks along the stony paths of Capri, scorching under the southern sun, feast his eyes on the golden color of the gorse, and on the swarthy children of the fishermen. In the evening, listening to stories about Russia and the country, he would sigh enviously and say, “I know very little of Russia – Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, exile in Siberia and that is nearly all.”

He loved fun, and when he laughed it was with his whole body; he was quite overcome with laughter and would laugh sometimes until he cried. He could give to his short, characteristic exclamation, “H’m, h’m,” an infinite number of modifications, from biting sarcasm to noncommittal doubt. Often in this “H’m, h’m” one caught the sound of the keen humor which a sharp-sighted man experiences who sees clearly through the stupidities of life.

Stocky and thick set, with his Socratic head and quick eyes, he would often adopt a strange and rather comical posture – he would throw his head back, inclining it somehow on to his shoulder, thrust his fingers under his armpits, in his waistcoat armholes. There was something deliciously funny in this pose, something of a triumphant fighting cock; and at such a moment he beamed all over with joy, a grown-up child in this accursed world, a splendid human being, who had to sacrifice himself to hostility and hatred, so that love might be at last realized.

I did not meet Lenin in Russia, or even see him from afar, until 1918, when the final base attempt was made on his life.¹ I came to him when he had hardly regained the use of his hand and could scarcely move his neck, which had been shot through. When I expressed my indignation, he replied, as though dismissing something of which he was tired: “A brawl. Nothing to be done. Every one acts according to his lights.”

We met on very friendly terms, but of course there was evident pity in dear Ilyitch’s sharp and penetrating glance, for I was one who had gone astray.

After several minutes he said heatedly: “He who is not with us is against us. People independent of the march of events – that is a fantasy. Even if we grant that such people did exist once, at present they do not and cannot exist. They are no good to any one. All, down to the last, are thrown into the whirl of an actuality which is more complicated than ever before. You say that I simplify life too much? That this simplification threatens culture with ruin, eh?”

Then the ironic, characteristic “H’m, h’m...”

His keen glance sharpened, and he continued in a lower tone: “Well, and millions of peasants with rifles in their hands are not a threat to culture according to you, eh? You think the Constituent Assembly could have coped with that anarchy? You who make such a fuss about the anarchy of the country should be able to understand our tasks better than others. We have got to put before the Russian masses something they can grasp. The Soviets and Communism are simple.

“A union of the workers and intelligentsia, eh? Well, that isn’t bad. Tell the intelligentsia. Let them come to us. According to you they are true servants of justice. What is the matter then? Certainly, let them come to us. We are just the ones who have undertaken the colossal job of putting the people on its feet, of telling the whole world the truth about life – it is we who are pointing out to the people the straight path to a human life, the path which leads out of slavery, beggary, degradation.”

He laughed and said without any trace of resentment: “That is why I received a bullet from the intelligentsia.”

When the temperature of the conversation was more or less normal, he said with vexation and sadness: “Do you think I quarrel with the idea that the intelligentsia is necessary to us? But you see how hostile their attitude is, how badly they understand the need of the moment? And they don’t see how powerless they are without us, how incapable of reaching the masses. They will be to blame if we break too many heads.” We almost always discussed this subject when we met. Although in what he said his attitude to the intelligentsia remained one of mistrust and hostility, in actuality he always correctly estimated the importance of intellectual energy in the revolutionary process, and seemed to agree that in essence revolution was the eruption of that energy unable to develop regularly in the straightened conditions which it has outgrown.

I remember one occasion when I was with him and three members of the Academy of Sciences. The conversation was about the necessity of reorganizing one of the highest scientific institutions in Petrograd. When he had seen them off Lenin said contentedly: “Now that’s all right. Those are clever men. With them everything is simple, everything is strictly formulated. You see at once that these people know exactly what they want. It is simply a pleasure to work with such people. I especially liked S.” – he named one of the greatest names in Russian science, and a day later even asked me by telephone: “Ask S. whether he will come and work with us.” And when S. accepted the proposal, he was sincerely glad, rubbing his hands together and saying jokingly: “One after another we shall win over all the Russian and European Archimedes, and then the world will have to change whether it wants to or not!”

At the 8th Congress of the Party,¹ N. I. Bukharin said among other things: “The nation is the bourgeoisie together with the proletariat. To recognize the right of some contemptible bourgeoisie to self-determination is absolutely out of place.”

“No, excuse me,” retorted Lenin, “it certainly is not out of place. You appeal to the process of the differentiation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, but let us wait and see how it will turn out.” Then pointing to the example of Germany, and to the slowness and difficulty with which the process of differentiation develops, and declaring that they would never succeed in planting Communism by means of force, he went on to discuss the question of the importance of the intelligentsia in industry, in the army, in the cooperative movement. I quote from Izvestia² from the debates of the Congress.

“This question must be decided at the coming Conference with complete definiteness. We can only build up Communism when it has become more accessible to the masses by means of bourgeois science and technique. For this, it is necessary to take over the apparatus from the bourgeoisie, to attract all the specialists to work in this connection. Without the bourgeois specialists it is impossible to increase the forces of production. They must be surrounded by an atmosphere of comradely cooperation, by workers’ commissars, by Communists; conditions must be created which will not allow them to break away, but they must be given the possibility of working better than under capitalism, for otherwise this layer which has received its education from the bourgeoisie, will not begin to work. It is impossible to make a whole layer work by main force.

“The bourgeois specialists are used to doing cultural work, they carried it on within the framework of the bourgeois regime, that is, they enriched the bourgeoisie by enormous material work and construction and gave a miserable share in this wealth to the proletariat. Nevertheless, they did carry forward the work of culture – that is their profession. In so far as they see that the workers not only value culture but also help to spread it among the masses, they will change their attitude towards us. Then they will be morally won over and not only politically divided from the bourgeoisie.

“We must attract them to our apparatus, and for that must be prepared to make sacrifices. In dealing with the specialists we must not keep to a system of petty vexations. We must give them the best conditions of life possible. That will be the best policy. If yesterday we talked of legalizing the petty bourgeois parties, and to-day arrest Mensheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, one straight line runs through this changing policy – the rooting out of counter-revolution and the acquisition of the cultural apparatus of the bourgeoisie.”

In this splendid expression of a great policy there is far more real, live sense than in all the wailing of the miserable hypocrisy of petty-bourgeois “humanitarianism.” Unfortunately, many who should have understood and appreciated this appeal to honest work in cooperation with the working class, have not understood or appreciated it. They have preferred hole and corner sabotage and treachery. After the abolition of serfdom, many of the house-serfs, slaves by nature, also remained to serve their masters in the very stables where they had been wont to flog them.

I often used to speak with Lenin about the cruelty of revolutionary tactics and life.

“What do you want?” he would ask in astonishment and anger. “Is it possible to act humanely in a struggle of such unprecedented ferocity? Where is there any place for soft-heartedness or generosity? We are being blockaded by Europe, we are deprived of the help of the European proletariat, counter-revolution is creeping like a bear on us from every side. What do you want? Are we not right? Ought we not to struggle and resist? We are not a set of fools. We know that what we want can only be achieved by ourselves. Do you think that I would be sitting here if I were convinced of the contrary?”

“What is your criterion for judging which blows are necessary and which are superfluous in a fight?” he asked once, after a heated discussion. I could only give a vague poetical answer to this simple question. It would be impossible to answer otherwise, I think.

I often overwhelmed him with requests of a different nature, and often felt that all the bother I went to for various people made Lenin pity me. He would ask, “Don’t you think you are wasting your energies on a lot of rubbish?”

But I continued to do what I thought ought to be done, and was not put off when the man who knew who were the enemies of the proletariat looked at me askance, in anger. He would shake his head crushingly and say, “You are compromising yourself in the eyes of the comrades and workers.”

I pointed out that comrades and workers, when their passions were roused and they were irritated, not infrequently hold too lightly the life and liberty of valuable people, and that this in my view not only compromised the honest hard work of the revolution by too great, sometimes even senseless, cruelty, but was objectively and strategically bad, as it repelled many important people from participation in the revolution.

“H’m, h’m,” Lenin muttered skeptically, and pointed out to me many cases when the intelligentsia betrayed the interests of the workers.

“Many people among us,” he said, “go over to the other side and betray us, not only out of cowardice, but because of their self-esteem, because they are afraid of finding themselves in an embarrassing situation, afraid that their beloved theory will suffer when it comes to grips with reality. But we are not afraid of that. There is nothing holy or sacred about theories or hypotheses for us, they serve us only as instruments.”

Yet I don’t remember a single instance when any request of mine met with a refusal from Ilyitch. If they were not always fulfilled, it was not his fault but the fault of the mechanism in which the clumsy Russian state machine has always abounded, and, let us grant, a certain malicious reluctance to lighten the lot or save the lives of people of worth. Perhaps, too, there were cases of willful harming, which is an enemy as cynical as it is cunning. Revenge and malice are often effective through force of inertia; and of course there are petty persons with unhealthy minds, with a morbid thirst for the delight of contemplating the sufferings of their neighbors.

Once he showed me a telegram, smiling. “They have arrested me again. Tell them to let me go.” It was signed Ivan Volny.

“I have read his book. I liked it very much. After reading the first five words I felt at once that here was a man who understood the inevitability of mistakes, who did not get angry, or fly into a rage if he was hurt personally. This is the third time, I think, that he has been arrested. You had better advise him to leave the village or they’ll kill him next. Evidently they are not very fond of him there. Advise him. By telegram.”

I was often struck by Lenin’s readiness to help people whom he considered to be his enemies, and not only readiness to help but even care for their future. One general, for example, a scientist, a chemist, was threatened with death. “H’m, h’m,” said Lenin, after listening attentively to my story. “So you think he didn’t know that his sons had hidden fire-arms in his laboratory? That seems rather unlikely. But we must leave it for Dzerzhinsky to unravel. He has a keen instinct for the truth.”

Several days later he rang me up in Petrograd and said, “We are letting your general go – I think he has already been set free. What does he intend to do?”

“Homoemulsion.”

“Yes, yes – carbolic acid. Well, let him boil his carbolic. Tell me if he is in need of anything.”

Lenin spoke ironically in order to conceal the joy, which he did not wish to show, of saving a man’s life. Several days later he asked again: “Well, how is the general getting on? Everything arranged?”

In the Petrograd kitchens in 1919 there appeared a very beautiful woman who demanded severely, “Give me a bone for my dogs! I am Princess T.”

There was a story that, unable to bear degradation and hunger any longer, she resolved to throw herself in the Neva, but, so it was said, her four dogs, who had an instinctive intuition of her sad intention, ran after her and by their howls and anguish made her renounce her idea of committing suicide. I related this story to Lenin. Looking me up and down with a sidelong glance, screwing up his eyes and then closing them entirely, he said gloomily, “Even if it is all made up, still the idea is not a bad one. A joke of the revolution.”

He was silent. Then he got up and, sorting the papers on the table, said thoughtfully: “Yes, those people are in great straits. History is a cruel stepmother, and when it retaliates, it stops at nothing. What is there to say? It is bad for those people. The clever ones among them understand of course that they have been torn up by the roots and will never grow again; and transplantation in Europe won’t satisfy the clever ones. You don’t think they will strike root there, do you?”

“I don’t think they will.”

“That means that they will either go our way or attempt to make another intervention.”

I asked him: “Does it only seem to me so, or do you really pity people?”

He answered; “I am sorry for the clever ones. We haven’t enough clever people. We are for the most part a talented people, but mentally lazy.” Recollecting several comrades who had outlived their class psychology and were working with the Bolsheviks, he spoke of them with astonishing warmth.

A man of astounding strength of will, Lenin possessed in the highest degree the best qualities and properties of the revolutionary intelligentsia – self-discipline often amounting to self-torture and self-mutilation, in its most extreme form, amounting to a renunciation of art and to the logic of one of L. Andreyev’s heroes: “Other people are living hard lives, and therefore I must live a hard life.”

In the hard famine year of 1919 Lenin was ashamed to eat the food which was sent to him by comrades, soldiers and peasants from the provinces. When the parcels came to his bleak flat he would frown, grow embarrassed, and hasten to give the flour, sugar and butter to the sick comrades or to those who were weak from lack of food.

Once, when he invited me to dine with him, he said: “I shall give you some smoked fish – it was sent to me from Astrakhan.” And with a frown on his Socratic forehead, turning his sharp glance away from me, he added: “They send things to me as though I were a lord! How can I prevent them doing it? If you refuse and don’t accept it, they are hurt. And every one around me is hungry.”

Entirely without any personal fads, a stranger to tobacco and wine, occupied from morning to night with complicated and difficult work, he had no thought of looking after himself, but kept a vigilant eye on the health of the comrades.

He would sit at his table in his study, talking quickly and writing without taking pen from paper: “Good morning. How are you? I am just finishing. There is a comrade in the village feeling lonely – evidently tired. He must be cheered up. State of mind is not the least important thing!”

Once I came to him in Moscow. He asked, “Have you dined?”

“Yes.”

“There are witnesses. I dined in the Kremlin dining room.”

“I heard that the dinners are not good there.”

“Not bad, but could be better.”

He immediately asked for details. “Why not good? In what way could they be improved?” He began to mutter angrily: “Why can’t they get an expert cook there? People work literally until they faint, they must be fed with good food so that they will eat more. I know there is very little food to be got, and that bad; they must get a good cook there.” Then he quoted the opinion of some hygienist about the part played by seasoning in the processes of eating and digestion. I asked: “How do you find time to think about such things?” He retorted with another question, “About rational feeding?” and by the tone of his voice I understood that my question was out of place.

An old acquaintance of mine, P. A. Skorokhodov, another Sormovo worker, a tender-hearted man, complained of the painfulness of work in the Tcheka.¹ I said to him, “I think that is not the right work for you. It isn’t congenial to you.” He agreed sadly, “Absolutely uncongenial.” But after thinking a little, he said: “But you know Ilyitch too has to stifle his emotions, and I am ashamed to be so weak.”

I knew and still know many workers who had to, and have to, grit their teeth hard, and stifle their emotions, to overcome their organic “social idealism” for the sake of the triumph of the cause they are serving. Did Lenin too have to stifle his emotions? He paid too little attention to himself to talk about himself to others; he, more than any one, could keep silent about the secret agitation of his soul.

Once, however, in Gorky, when he was caressing some children, he said: “These will have happier lives than we had. They will not experience much that we lived through. There will not be so much cruelty in their lives.”

Then, looking into the distance, to the hills where the village nestled, he added pensively: “And yet I don’t envy them. Our generation achieved something of amazing significance for history. The cruelty, which the conditions of our life made necessary, will be understood and vindicated. Everything will be understood, everything.” He caressed the children with great care, with an especially gentle and tender touch.

Once I came to him and saw War and Peace lying on the table.

“Yes. Tolstoy. I wanted to read over the scene of the hunt, then remembered that I had to write to a comrade. Absolutely no time for reading. Only last night I managed to read your book on Tolstoy.”

Smiling and screwing up his eyes, he stretched himself deliciously in his armchair and, lowering his voice, added quickly, “What a Colossus, eh? What a marvelously developed brain! Here’s an artist for you, sir. And do you know something still more amazing? You couldn’t find a genuine muzhik in literature until this Count came on the scene.”

Then screwing up his eyes and looking at me, he asked, “Can you put any one in Europe beside him?” and replied himself, “No one.” And he rubbed his hands, laughing contentedly.

I more than once noticed this trait in him, this pride in Russian literature. Sometimes this feature appeared to me strangely foreign to Lenin’s nature, appeared even naive, but I learned to perceive in it the echo of his deep-seated, joyful love for his fatherland. In Capri, while watching how the fishermen carefully disentangle the nets, torn and entangled by the sharks, he observed: “Our men work more quickly.” When I cast some doubt on this remark, he said with a touch of vexation, “H’m, h’m. Don’t you think you are forgetting Russia, living on this bump?”

V. A. Dyesnitsky-Stroyev told me that he was once traveling through Sweden with Lenin in a train, and looking at a German monograph on Dürer. Some Germans, sitting in the same carriage, asked him what the book was. Later it appeared that they had never heard of their great artist. This almost roused enthusiasm in Lenin, and twice he said to Dyesnitsky proudly: “They don’t know their own artists, but we do.”

One evening in Moscow, in E. P. Pyeskovskaya’s flat, Lenin was listening to a sonata by Beethoven being played by Isaiah Dobrowein, and said: “I know nothing which is greater than the Appassionata; I would like to listen to it every day. It is marvelous superhuman music. I always think with pride – perhaps it is naive of me – what marvelous things human beings can do!”

Then screwing up his eyes and smiling, he added, rather sadly: “But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke any one’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against any one. H’m, h’m, our duty is infernally hard!”

When he himself was nearly a sick man, quite worn out, he wrote me, August 9, 1921:

“A. M!

“I sent on your letter to L. B. Kamenev. I am so tired that I am incapable of the slightest work. And you are spitting blood and yet don’t go away? That really is disgracefully imprudent. In Europe, in a good sanatorium, you will get well and be able to do something else worth while. Really, really. But here you can neither get well, nor do anything. There is nothing for you here but bother, useless bother. Go away and get well. Don’t be obstinate, I implore you!

For more than a year, he insisted with astonishing persistence that I should leave Russia. I was amazed that, entirely absorbed in work as he was, he should remember there was a sick person somewhere in need of rest. He wrote letters like this to different people – scores, probably.

I have already described his quite exceptional attitude to the comrades, his attention to them, which penetrated down even to the smallest details of their lives. But in this feature of his I never caught the note of that self-interested care which a clever master sometimes exhibits toward an honest and expert workman. This was not the case with Lenin. His was the heartfelt interest of a sincere comrade, the love which exists between equals. I know that it is impossible to consider as Lenin’s equals even the greatest people in his Party, but he himself didn’t seem to realize this, or more probably, did not want to realize it. He was sometimes sharp with people, when arguing with them, pitilessly ridiculed them, even laughed at them in a venomous fashion. All this he did. But how many times, when judging the people whom yesterday he criticized and rebuked, was there clearly evident the note of genuine wonder at their talents and moral steadfastness; at their unflagging labor under the abominable conditions of 1918-1921, work amid spies of all countries and parties, amid the plots which swelled like festering sores on the body of the war- exhausted country!

They worked without rest, they ate little and badly, they lived amid ceaseless alarm. But Lenin himself did not seem to feel the hardness of these conditions, of the unforeseen dangers of a society which had been shaken to the very foundations by the murderous storms of civil strife. Only once did anything like a complaint escape him, and that was when he was talking with M. F. Andreyeva, in his room.

“What else can we do, dear M. F.? We have no alternative but to fight. Do we find it hard? Of course we do! You think it is not hard for me? It is, and very hard too. But look at Dzerzhinsky. He is beginning to look like nothing at all. There is nothing to be done about it. It is better to suffer than to fail.”

The only regret he ever expressed in my presence was: “I am sorry, deeply sorry, that Martov is not with us. What a splendid comrade he was, what an absolutely sincere man!”

I remember how long and heartily he laughed at reading Martov’s remark somewhere, “There are only two Communists in Russia, Lenin and Kollontay.” He laughed and then sighed, “What a clever woman she is!”

It was with genuine respect and wonder that he remarked, after conducting one comrade, an administrator, out of his study, “Have you known him for long? He would be at the head of the cabinet in any country in Europe.” Rubbing his hands and smiling, he added: “Europe is poorer than we are in talent.”

Once I proposed that we should go together to the Chief Artillery Department to see an apparatus which had been invented by a Bolshevik, an old artillery man, to adjust artillery fire directed against airplanes. “What do I understand about that?” he said, but he went with me.

In a dark room around a table on which stood the apparatus were gathered seven generals with scowling faces, gray, bewhiskered old men, all scientists. Among them the modest civilian figure of Lenin was lost, dropped into insignificance.

The inventor began to explain the construction of the apparatus. Lenin listened to him for two or three minutes, then said approvingly, “H’m, h’m,” and began to question the man with as much ease as if he were examining him on some political question.

“And how do you manage to get the machine to do two things simultaneously, when it is laying the sight? Would it be impossible to form an automatic connection between the mounting of the barrel and the indications of the mechanism?” He asked how far the dangerous space extended, and something else. The inventor and the generals gave eager explanations, and next day the former said to me:

“I had told my generals that you were coming with a comrade, but I didn’t say who the comrade was. They didn’t recognize Ilyitch and probably would never have imagined that he could appear without a great deal of ceremony or a bodyguard. They asked me, ‘Is he a technical engineer or a professor? What? Lenin? What a surprise! How is it possible? How does he know so much about these things we’re concerned with? He asked those questions like a technologist.’ What mystification!”

Apparently they didn’t really believe that it was Lenin. On the way from the Chief Artillery Department, Lenin kept chuckling, and talked about the inventor.

“See how easily you can be mistaken in a man! I knew that he was an honest old comrade, but qui n’a fas invente la poudre! [who has not invented powder]. But that seems to be precisely in his line. Good fellow! And didn’t the generals go for me when I expressed my doubts as to the practical value of the apparatus? And I did it on purpose, wanted to know what they thought of the ingenious contrivance.”

He shook with laughter, then asked: “Tell me, has I. any more inventions to his credit? Well, he oughtn’t to work at anything else. Ah, if only we could give all these technical engineers ideal conditions for their work! In twenty-five years Russia would be the foremost country of the world.”

Yes, he often praised the comrades in my hearing, even those with whom he was not personally in sympathy. Lenin knew how to appreciate their energy. I was very surprised at his high appreciation of L. D. Trotsky’s organizing abilities. V. Ilyitch noticed my surprise.

“Yes, I know there are lying rumors about my attitude to him. But what is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t – that I know also. He was able at any rate to organize the military experts.”

After a pause he added in a lower tone, and rather sadly: “And yet he isn’t one of us. With us, but not of us. He is ambitious. There is something of Lassalle in him, something which isn’t good.”

These words, “with us, but not of us,” he used twice in my hearing, the second time about another prominent man, who died soon after V. Ilyitch himself.

V. Ilyitch understood people very well, as was natural. Once when I went into his study, I found a man who was backing to the door and bowing at the same time to V. Ilyitch, and V. I. continued his writing without raising his eyes.

“Do you know him?” he asked, pointing toward the door.

I said I had come into contact with him twice – over the “Universal Literature” business.

“Well?”

“An ignorant, uncultured person, I should say.”

V. Ilyitch was not mistaken. Several months later this man justified Lenin’s description to the full.

He thought a lot about people because, as he said, “Our apparatus is very unsteady. Since October many elements have crept in. Your pious and beloved intelligentsia are to blame for that – it is the result of their mean sabotage.”

He said this to me while we were walking in Gorky. I began speaking about Alexinsky, I don’t remember why, probably he was up to one of his dirty tricks at the time.

“You can picture it to yourself. At our first meeting I had a feeling of physical repulsion toward him. I couldn’t conquer it. No one has ever given me such a feeling before. We had to do some work together. I had to use every method to keep myself in check – it was very awkward. I felt – I simply cannot stand this degenerate.”

Then, shrugging his shoulders in amazement, he said: “But I never saw through that scoundrel Malinovsky. That was a very mysterious affair, Malinovsky.”

To me he was a strict teacher, and devoted friend.

“You are an enigmatic person,” he said to me jokingly. “In literature you seem to be a good realist – and in your attitude to people, a romanticist. Are all people victims of history for you? We know history, and we say to the victims, ‘Overturn the altars! Break down the temples! Down with the gods!’ And you want to convince me that the militant party of the working class is bound first of all to make the intelligentsia comfortable.”

I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that V. Ilyitch liked talking to me. He almost always suggested, “Come and see me – ring up, we will meet.”

Once he said: “It’s interesting to talk to you. You have a varied and wide circle of impressions.” He would ask about the attitude of the intelligentsia, he was especially interested in the scientists. At that time I was working with N. B. Khalatov on the Committee for Improving the Conditions of the Scientists.

He was interested in proletarian literature. “What do you think will come of it?”

I said that I expected a great deal, but considered it necessary to organize a Litvuz (institute for the study of literature), with chairs of philology, foreign languages – Western and Oriental – of folklore, of the history of universal literature, and of Russian literature separately.

“H’m, h’m,” he said screwing up his eyes and chuckling. “Very wide and very dazzling! I am not against its being wide – but if it is to be dazzling – eh? We haven’t professors of our own for these subjects, and the bourgeois professors will teach history of a sort. No, I don’t think we must set about that yet. We must wait three or five years.”

Then he would complain, “Have absolutely no time for reading!” He frequently and with strong emphasis referred to the value of Demyan Bedny’s work for propaganda, but added: “It is somewhat crude. He follows the reader whereas he ought to be a little way ahead.”

He mistrusted Mayakovsky, and was even rather irritated by him. “He shouts, invents some sort of distorted words, and doesn’t get anywhere in my opinion – and besides is incomprehensible. It is all disconnected, difficult to read. He is talented? Very talented even? H’m, h’m. We shall see. But doesn’t it seem to you that people are writing a lot of poetry now? There are whole pages of it in the newspapers and volumes of it appear every day.”

I remarked that it was natural for youth to be attracted to poetry at such a time, and that in my opinion it is easier to write mediocre verse than good prose, and poetry takes less time. In addition we have many good teachers of the art of versifying.

“I don’t believe it’s easier to write verse than prose. I can’t imagine it. I couldn’t write two lines of poetry if you flayed me alive.” Then he frowned. “We must spread among the masses all the old revolutionary literature – all that we have here and in Europe.”

He was a Russian who lived for a long time away from his native land, and had examined it attentively – -from afar it appears brighter and more beautiful. He estimated accurately its potential forces, and the exceptional talents of its people, which were as yet feebly expressed, unawakened by a monotonous and oppressive history, but which gleamed everywhere like golden stars against the somber background of the fantastic life of Russia.

Vladimir Lenin, profoundly and greatly a man of this world, is dead. His death is a grievous blow to the hearts of those who knew him, grievous indeed.

But the darkness of death only emphasizes the more strongly to the world his great importance as the leader of the working class of the world.

And if the dark cloud of hatred, of lies and calumny, were even denser than it is, it would matter not at all. There is no force which can put out the torch which Lenin raised aloft in the stifling darkness of a mad world.

And no other man has so well deserved the eternal remembrance of the world.

Vladimir Lenin is dead. But the inheritors of his thought and will are alive. They live and carry on a work which is more victorious than any other in the history of mankind.